When you work at an innovation lab, and you have all that blue sky, how do you get started innovating? 

That was the first question Lija Hogan, UserTesting’s Principal Experience Research Strategy, asked in her Insights Unlocked interview with Leeyat Tessler, Senior User Experience Researcher at Capital One's Innovation Lab. Leeyat has been a UX designer for about a decade and at Capital One for five of those years.

“So as a researcher specifically at the lab, I'm really focused on: should we even build something in this area? What should we build?,” she said. “It's kind of the same process you'll do when adding a new feature to an existing product. But since we're building a totally net-new product, it's at a higher-level scale, often with bigger stakes and risks.”

The lab designs new products for its customers and internal associates, typically ones that involve emerging technologies, Leeyat said. “And the lab is really purpose built to help define the future of our business by building those transformational products and also inspire new ways to work at the company,” she said. 

She said some of what they explore at the lab “will ultimately be put on ice because of early signals they aren’t presently a good fit.”

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When exploring a new field, Leeyat said, they will start with a totally open subject area. Some examples could include parent-child money sharing, or something more technical like accounts receivable. 

“My first step is always seeing what’s out there, reviewing existing literature to get up to speed,” she said. “Then we’ll often move into qualitative research, typically interviews or in context observations.”

From there, they proceed to some type of quantitative method, often a survey or data analysis, to measure the current situation and get a sense of how common the problem is that people are experiencing.

“And I often find that as we dive deeper and come up with a potential solution that on the research front, alternating qualitative and then quantitative is really useful,” Leeyat said.

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They may also explore opportunities that arise from emerging technologies. “And as the researcher, that's when I try to pivot the conversation to a pain point that that emerging technology could solve for to really launch us and start researching,” she said.